Out of Anarchism and Into the Academy: The Many Lives of Frank Tannenbaum

The New York winter and early spring of 1913–1914 was a severe one, with unusually biting temperatures adding to the suffering of the unemployed, who numbered over a quarter of a million of the city’s residents. Emma Goldman recalled that “the papers minimized the appalling state of affairs,” while officials and even reformers temporized. Into the breach stepped members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). These “militant elements resolved upon action,” she wrote. “The anarchists and the IWWs organized the unemployed and secured considerable relief for them.” Her autobiography notes “then an unexpected thing happened, which gave the situation compelling publicity. Out of the ranks of starved and frozen humanity the slogan came to visit religious institutions. The unemployed, led by a vivid youth named Frank Tannenbaum, began a march on the churches of New York.” No candidate for fiery militancy was less obvious than Frank Tannenbaum (1893–1969). This agitator was “studious” and “quiet,” modest and alert; such were the qualities for which “we all had loved Frank.” These attributes gave Goldman and her allies “the hope that Frank would someday play an important part in the labor struggle. None of us had expected however that our friend would so quickly respond to the call of the hour.”¹

On the night of 4 March 1914, which happened to be his 21st birthday, he led 189 jobless men to St. Alphonsus, a Roman Catholic church on West Broadway. Several houses of worship had already offered help. She noted that, “whether out of fear or because of the realization of the significance of the march on the churches, several of them gave shelter, food, and money to the bands of the jobless.” But the rector of St. Alphonsus, with the assistance of two detectives, trapped Tannenbaum; he and several of the unemployed men were arrested, though only he was indicted. In attendance at the criminal trial a month later were editor Max Eastman of the Masses, as well as bohemia’s favorite hostess, Mabel Dodge, and they observed the eloquence with which Tannenbaum defended himself in front of a jury stocked with businessmen. He was convicted of unlawful assembly, and given a sentence of one year’s imprisonment plus a $500 fine.² No wonder then that Emma Goldman embraced him in his fight, and her most famous comrade, Alexander Berkman, praised him for having acted in the class struggle “like a man, and that is the highest I could say—as a man and true revolutionist.”³

That march of the unemployed marked the pivotal moment in the radical career of one of the most versatile of American intellectuals. What brought him to St. Alphonsus, and above all what he made of his remarkable life thereafter, is the subject of this essay, which traces the process of deradicalization. But Tannenbaum’s varied interests and allegiances revealed enough vestiges of his onetime anarchism to suggest that the politics he once championed continued to find expression and exert some influence upon American civic and academic life. He certainly deserves to be rescued from oblivion. The Dictionary of American Biography does not bother to include him, nor is his life recounted in the American National Biography. Tannenbaum is not even mentioned in the comprehensive Encyclopedia of the American Left (1998). Even though he was a Wobbly, his name is omitted from We Shall Be All (1969), Melvyn Dubofsky’s huge and outstanding book on the IWW (also known as Wobblies). As Tannenbaum distanced himself from the high-stakes tumult of domestic dissent in the era of the Great War, he would earn recognition in several fields—so many, in fact, that half a dozen men of accomplishment and impact might well have borne the same name. There was in fact only one Frank Tannenbaum, who made himself most importantly into a specialist on the history of the Americas. He garners only a desultory paragraph, however, in the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (1996). The point need not be belabored. For “a legendary U.S...